The work of agents is critical to the Reserve Bank of India’s aim of providing bank services to India’s 600,000 villages by 2016.

Ajmal Baghel works as a mobile bank for people living in some of the most remote villages in India.

The 25-year-old goes from door to door around Chattisgarh in eastern India offering to help residents open bank accounts, deposit cash and withdraw money on the spot. The maximum transaction is 10,000 rupees ($178).

He is one of thousands of so-called banking correspondents– bank agents – employed by India’s banks as part of their mandated financial inclusion programs. They offer banking services in villages too far-flung for established bank branches.

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The work of agents like Mr. Baghel is critical to the Reserve Bank of India’s aim of providing bank services to India’s 600,000 villages by 2016. But at a conference this week to discuss their work, many complained they were not being paid in a timely manner –in some cases waiting two years to be paid — and had not received proper training.

The main reason for this is that 70% of Indians live in rural areas, many of which, banks says, are so small or remote that it is impractical to open or service a physical branch.

To solve the problem, the Reserve Bank of India in 2006 allowed banks to appoint banking correspondents to serve as a conduit between bank branches and hard-to-reach villagers.

A bank can also hire a company as its banking correspondent, which, in turn, hires individual agents.

The correspondents must put down a deposit of up to 30,000 rupees at the start of their employment, this covers the cost of the mobile banking equipment; a hand-held smart-card reader with fingerprint verification technology.

A customer makes a transaction using their smart card, placing one finger on a panel to verify their identity. They are issued a receipt on the spot.

But when it comes to getting paid themselves, many say there is a problem.

At a conference Tuesday of 90 banking correspondents and banks, organized by the Reserve Bank of India in Pune, correspondents said they hadn’t been trained to use the hand-held devices or how to sell banking products. But the most frequent complaint among them was a delay in salary payments.

The meeting was an attempt to understand what’s happening at the grassroots level and improve the banking correspondent system, Reserve Bank of India Governor Duvvuri Subbarao, said.

Geeta Lahare, a banking correspondent from Ratkuna village in Chattisgarh, said she worked without pay for two years until she was remunerated last month.

“Whenever I would ask the company for my salary, they would tell me I would get it in a few days,” she told The Wall Street Journal’s India Real Time.

Ajay Kumar Samantray, a project manager at HCL Infosystems Ltd., the company that hired Ms. Lahare, told the conference that HCL had hired another company to manage banking correspondents. HCL only dealt with technology issues, he said.

HCL uses a number of companies as agents, the company told The Wall Street Journal after the conference. In the case of Ms. Lahare, the agency was M/s. Sparrow, HCL said in a statement.

“Our records say that regular payments have been made to the banking correspondent agency by HCL Infosystems,” the company said.

It is the responsibility of the agency to make payments to the agents, and the statement added that payments were up to date according to the agency’s records.

“We as primary owners have taken this feedback and will work to further strengthen the process,” HCL added.

It was not immediately possible to reach M/s. Sparrow.

Mr. Samantray also said that banking correspondents couldn’t be paid until the commercial bank at the top of the structure–Central Bank of India in this case–processed the payments.

The CBI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Subbarao acknowledged that the banking correspondent system needed to be made more accountable. “We will prepare some [instruction] manuals so that the roles are more clearly defined,” he told reporters after the conference.

Verifying the identity of the correspondents is also an issue the correspondents face.

Mr. Baghel says he has yet to be issued an identity card by the State Bank of India, his employer, to prove he is a genuine correspondent. This, he says, makes him vulnerable when going about his job.

“We keep hearing stories of how the police stop people traveling after dark and hold them overnight on suspicions of being a Maoist, [if they don’t have ID] ” said Mr. Baghel, whose village, Kusmi, is in the heavily-forested tribal region of the state where Maoist insurgents are active.

A bank identity card would help him prove to the security forces that he is not a Maoist, and his family would worry about him less, he added. The SBI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The number of banking correspondents has increased around five fold, to more than 150,000, in the past three years, according to RBI.

Separate figures for the number of bank accounts they have opened for villagers do not exist, but since the correspondents began work, 150 million bank accounts have been opened across India.

According to the RBI in the last three years, 74,000 villages with a population of at least 2,000 have been able to access banking services for the first time, mainly through banking correspondents.

About India Real Time

India Real Time offers analysis and insights into the broad range of developments in business, markets, the economy, politics, culture, sports, and entertainment that take place every single day in the world’s largest democracy. Regular posts from Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires reporters around the country provide a unique take on the main stories in the news, shed light on what else mattered and why, and give global readers a snapshot of what Indians have been talking about all week. You can contact the editors at indiarealtime(at)wsj(dot)com.